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Health & Fitness

Creating Positive Value

Creating positive value has always been important to me. Early in life, I discovered many "creative" ways I could help myself and others.

Creating positive value has always been important to me. Early in life, I discovered many "creative" ways I could help myself and others. I was thanked, some threw money my direction, and sometimes I got both. This gave me a sense of worth that drives me even today.

My first “career” was at age 9, when my father, a salesmen, let me create and maintain a filing system of index cards of all his clients. This task both fascinated and challenged my puzzle-driven mind, and I soon realized I had something to offer.  Since then, I have found many ways to mix wage earning jobs with my inherent skill sets and things I enjoy doing.

At age 11, I was the kid always “organizing” neighborhood play activities. So it was no surprise that I soon gained the reputation of being the best babysitter around.  I remember one summer evening I babysat 12 children from 3 different families, ranging in age from 9 months to 10 years old.  While each family paid me my normal rate, it definitely took a lot of mental juggling to keep track of everyone! In the end it was a good thing notoriety as well as money motivated me, since my mom made me return the exorbitant tip thrust on me by the three sets of grateful parents!

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At age 13, I discovered that the “gray ladies” in my neighborhood were thrilled to find a “door to door” hairdresser. And while this was not my career choice for life, I did pretty well at it and I acquired a very appreciative clientele that year.

At age 15, it seemed perfectly logical that I should teach myself to type, since it reminded me of the piano playing I loved. And learning to type was in fact easy; I loved the rhythm and speed of creating words on paper. I soon convinced a  local business owner to give me a job in his home office. I applied my youthful love of filing and organization, my good math skills and logic. I set up a very basic accounting system for him, paying his bills invoicing his customers and balancing his checkbook. He was definitely sorry to see me leave for college two summers later.

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At home with my first child in my early twenties, a very limited budget sent me down the path of searching for inexpensive toys...we did not yet have the luxury of "dollar stores"! Using fabric remnants, buttons and other sewing notions I found in my closet, I created a couple of hand puppets that were instant hits with my son.  Soon my living room became the production area for creating custom-designed hand puppets, as I fulfilled the many requests that poured in from friends and friends of friends. It was a common site to see as many as 50 puppets at a time in varying stages of production across the entire living room floor. Christmas expenses that year were easily covered, and the even greater reward was the applause I received from my creative efforts.

A few years later, when my youngest child became a toddler, I began a series of office jobs in the corporate world, where success at one job always seemed to lead to another career: Processing orders led to export documentation and negotiating letters of credits; soothing angry customers led to my role of office supervisor. Having my “nose” in everything led me to join the training department; and training others led me to a job designing internal operational databases.

My “get-er-done” attitude put me at the door of another Fortune 500 company who wanted me to record a safety training video for them. With no experience at all with video, I hesitantly accepted their offer, and within a month this job led me to an eight-year career as a sales operations manager, supervising a team of 35 engineers, project managers and customer service reps.

I, like many others, have been laid off several times over the years, and definitely find the experience to be very unsettling. However, I have always been able to land another job. The common thread over my working life has not been maintaining a similar career path, but rather my personal conviction that in whatever I was doing, I needed to create value.

As a Baby Boomer, with my own traditional “retirement age” at hand, I am not yearning for that magical world of retirement that I remember people talking about when I was a child. Yes, retiring from working in Corporate America, but retiring to new work challenges that interest me and will allow me to continue to create positive value. Perhaps the real “Fountain of Youth” is simply this spirit of youth, keeping us younger than our years. That being the case, we definitely expect to “live long and prosper!"

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